It’s been an interesting few days on the Rollerbillies’ blog. Thanks for stopping by to check it out – we’ve enjoyed the comments, the debate, and the spiky blog stats. Free speech sure does keep life interesting; however, if you have a computer-based job it does tend to have a negative impact on your productivity.

I used to think we ought to pay real money and get a website; now I’m glad we were skint and had to get a free blog. They’re ace. If you write one, or if your league has one we don’t know about, tell us; we’d love to add you to our blogroll.

As well as tracking down some derby blogs, we’ve been adding more links for UK leagues; if we’ve managed to neglect yours then (a) get yourselves on the wikipedia list, and (b) shout and we’ll add you. And hey, why not get a blog? You can do it for free on wordpress, blogspot, livejournal, or typepad (none of whom are paying me to say this) and it’s a cakewalk compared to myspace. If you want to capture the evolution of your league, write some commentary on bouts, or if you like licking other people’s pads when they’re not looking and want to tell us about it, get it out there.

With London so close to us, the Rollerbillies have been to all LRG’s home games, but we hadn’t seen any other bouts at all. How rubbish of us. To make up for it, we decided to take a trip north for Band of Brawlers – Birmingham Blitz Derby Dames vs. Stuttgart Valley Rollergirlz. We were pretty stoked to see two completely different leagues compete – and we’d heard that Birmingham have those cool bleachers we’ve seen in American high school movies, so the venue sounded neat too.

BBDD billed the event as the first pan European bout held on UK soil. Exciting. With the UK roller derby scene growing all the time, we’re looking forward to welcoming more leagues from Europe (and beyond) to play here, and wanted them to know how much we appreciate the effort they’ve made to travel here. Stuttgart have bouted the London Rockin Rollers in Germany twice, so we hung out in the suicide seats with LRR, CCR, and LRG and made some noise for Stuttgart.

It was a closely played game. The first half was a bit chaotic, and ended with the Blitzdames taking the lead and finishing with a score of 49-30. But Stuttgart didn’t let go and kept the point differential small throughout the rest of the game – they got some good checks in, but their jammers kept taking the outside and losing their position. If you were there and you heard people screaming ‘inside! inside!’ that may have been us.

Now that we’ve been training for a while we’re looking at bouts as opportunities to soak up the strategies in play; we’re paying attention to the reffing, and we’re watching the points. And this was definitely the most confusing bout we’ve seen. We could have really used more commentary, and the cool-looking electronic scoreboard turned out to be pretty slow compared to the painted letters we’re used to (and didn’t involve cute scoregirls, which was a disappointment). There were some straggly pack moments that left us wondering who was in play, and several times we thought the jam was called off but it kept on going. We were perplexed.

So overall there was plenty to be looking at and taking in. It’s always more exciting when the points are close all the way through a bout, and we were yelling pretty loudly as a result of all that tension. With the final score at 75 – 81 to BBDD, it was tight til the end. It was great to see different leagues play, and awesome to meet the girlz from Stuttgart.

I guess we’ve become accustomed to a lot of audience interaction and commentary, awesome music, and lovely ladies offering us cupcakes and raffle tickets, so the atmosphere of this bout felt quite different compared to LRG’s events. Perhaps the cupcakes were cancelled due to rationing? The venue definitely has a lot of potential – we liked the bleachers; shame there weren’t more fans on them.

Last night we got our skates on in the newly squatted Mill Road Social Centre – formerly the Wilco and almost Tesco. It’s pretty big, once all the furniture’s out of the way. Not quite big enough for a track, but still room to skate. Our Romsey Town neighbours walking past the enormous front window seemed to like the look of Roller Derby – and with dogs running around inside, we got to practice fulfilling the WFTDA basic skills requirement 4.5: Unexpected Obstacles. Result.

Derby love to all the excellent photographers hanging out at the Centre last night!

If you want to join us for the next skate at the Mill Road Social Centre, watch this space for the next date – and see the I WANT IN page for the skinny on joining in.

It’s hard making team decisions.. first we argued about what our team colours should be (we ‘agreed’ on zombie green and leopard print), then we came to blows over our photoshoot for Bizarre. Luckily, we look pretty good fighting.